The Influence Of Environmental Racism

Being a discussant leader, this week was truly an amazing experience for me. During the group discussion my group members and I engaged in a very critical discussion about this week’s readings. Almost all my group members had never heard of the term environmental racism or justice. This made all of us question how come we never learned about environmental racism/ justice before? I challenged my group members by asking them if they were familiar with the terrible environmental conditions that First Nations communities were living in. Most of them said yes and then I got them to think about environmental racism. Why is it always racialized and marginalized communities that face the environmental burdens? A lot of my group members asked me what environmental justice looked like. I explained to them that environmental justice is focused in the health and well being of citizens. I told my group members that we are lucky to be educators because we can actually challenge and teach our students to question environmental racism using a critical global citizenship lens. …show more content…
This is because in the curriculum it talks about global issues while using a social studies inquiry process to investigate those global issues and critically explore them. Most of my group members suggested that environmental racism/justice can be discussed in the primary grades, but by using story books. We all agreed that teaching about any social justice issue can be related to not only social studies, but can be taught from a cross curricular approach. We all thought that a great way to introduce students to environmental racism would be by taking students for a community walk. If there are waste sites located in that community get students inquire why. If there are no waste sites or areas of pollution also get the students to question